


Stork Club, DIY Style

by Siria



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 04:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19143577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: He hadn't thought he could be any more proud of her, but that was Peggy for you: always capable of more than you even thought to ask for.





	Stork Club, DIY Style

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheafrotherdon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/gifts).



> Thanks to trinityofone for betaing!

He hadn't thought he could be any more proud of her, but that was Peggy for you: always capable of more than you even thought to ask for. As soon as she opened the door of her little house and saw Steve standing there, she produced a pistol from who-knew-where and pointed it right at him, no hesitation.

"I'm an excellent shot, you know," she said. Her tone was briskly conversational, but there was a muscle working at her jawline. "I can drop you where you stand."

"I know," Steve said, because it was true. And it'd be hard to blame her if she did take a pop at him. It was September of '47. As far as the world was concerned, Captain Steven Rogers had died more than two years ago. As far as Peggy was concerned, she'd heard him die. "Peggy, it's not a trick. It's—I'm me."

"You—"

"I know I'm a bit late for that dance," he said, trying for his most winning smile and fearing he just looked pained instead. "But if you're still willing? Can't promise I won't be all left feet, though. I'm pretty out of practice."

"My god, you're so terrible at this you must be him…" Peggy's face did something complicated. She went pale and lowered the gun. "But you died."

"Yes," Steve said, because in a sense, it was true. 

When he'd returned the Time Stone to the Ancient One, Steve had asked her for one last favour. She hadn't looked too pleased about it—had looked like she had a bad smell right under her nose—but she'd sighed and said, "A man out of time with a long-past promise still to keep. Well, I suppose there's something to work with there."

She'd conjured up half a dozen streams of light in the palm of her hand: each one a timeline where the Allies had won but the plane Steve was piloting had hit rock or open ocean instead of the ice. Any one of them represented an opportunity at a life where Steve could do some good, where he could love Peggy the way she'd deserved, all without trying to step into some other guy's shoes while he was still wearing them.

Steve had picked one of the timelines at random, and so here he was: standing on Peggy's porch and hoping that he still had a shot at being the kind of man she'd once thought he might be.

"Yeah, but I'm here now." He dug in his pocket and pulled out his compass, opened it and held it out in the palm of one hand so Peggy could see her picture. It was something else, to look up from the yellowed, faded newsprint and see Peggy just as vital as the day the picture had been taken. "Took me a while, but I… I followed you home, I guess." 

Peggy stared at him for a long moment. Then her pistol disappeared back to wherever she'd produced it from, and she took a step back to let him in. 

The entryway was cramped and dim and this close to her, Steve could smell her perfume for the first time in years. He closed his eyes, and had to swallow around a lump in his throat when she reached up to cup his cheek in one hand. 

"Steve," she said, her voice sounding thick with tears. "You look… Is it really is you?"

He nodded.

"Right, yes. Well." Peggy cleared her throat.

Steve opened his eyes to see her very visibly pulling herself together, her face turned away from him. He'd seen her struggle like this only once before. They'd been a few miles outside of Milan and she'd received a telegram telling her that a favourite cousin's bomber had been shot down over Normandy, no survivors.

"Tea, I think," Peggy said briskly. "Tea and a talk."

The kitchen was small and cluttered in a way that said that its owner intended to do more cooking than she ever got around to. There was a thin layer of dust on the baking equipment stacked on one countertop. Steve hovered for a while before deciding that he was just in the way—he’d forgotten how involved a process this could be when you couldn’t just ask an AI to brew whatever you wanted in the blink of an eye. He retreated to the living room.

Peggy clearly spent more time in here. Two armchairs flanked a radio; on a low table between them were a stack of papers and a basket of mending. A small dining table had been taken over by more papers and an unfolded map of western Canada. On one wall, a clock kept time, its ticking loud in the afternoon quiet. The air smelled of beeswax and the lingering scent of Peggy's perfume; the sound of Steve's footsteps were muffled by a thick rug, obviously some kind of antique. 

When he was a kid, back before the wars, Steve could never have imagined being invited to set foot in a place this. Now, after it all, it was terrifying just how much he hoped he'd be asked to stay.

"Do sit," Peggy said, bustling in with a heaped tray of tea things. "You make me feel like I'm being inspected, standing around like that." Steve sat in one of the armchairs—too low to be anything but awkward for someone with legs as long as his—and Peggy took the one opposite him. The tray perched perilously between them on the table.

"Well?" Peggy said, crossing her feet at the ankles and folding her hands in her lap. She didn't actually pour either of them a cup of tea, and Steve had no illusions as to who was the one being inspected here.

"It's a long story," Steve said, which earned him two raised eyebrows. Fair enough. He'd had time to decide on what to tell her, but there was no form of words he could think of that didn't seem like a lie, or a fairytale, or worse, patronising. If he hadn't thought it would make things worse rather than better, he'd have tried his hand at sketching it out for her: a time-travelling monkey in a suit. 

"Remember how our people couldn't work out how Schmidt was powering some of his weapons?"

Peggy frowned. "Yes?"

"He found an energy source. It was really powerful and really old and it… it wasn't from Earth. I know how it sounds," Steve continued when Peggy opened her mouth to protest. "I _know_ it sounds nuts. I can't tell you how many days since I've woken up up and thought for a moment I must be in one of those pulp comics Bucky loved. But it's true."

"An alien energy source," Peggy said, her diction so clipped and precise that Steve knew she was teetering on the verge of losing her temper. She'd never had much patience when she'd thought someone was messing her around.

"Yes," Steve said, as firmly as he knew how. "That's what he had with him on that plane, that's what we were fighting over just before the crash. And then I went into the ice, but between the serum and the cold, I didn't die, I just… hibernated, I guess." The SHIELD scientists always got real mad when Steve used that word because it wasn't accurate. Steve didn't much care. It felt like he'd slept through a long winter, after all. 

"You didn't die," Peggy said faintly. She was gripping the arms of her chair, and Steve longed to cross over to her, to hold her, but better to just get it all over with no.

"No. I slept and then… then I woke up." He took a deep breath, and held her gaze as steady as he could, because he loved her. "I woke up in 2012, Peg."

Peggy stared at him. 

Steve kept going. "And I lived through until 2023, and then because of, well, some other alien power sources"—he was not going to get into the specifics of Thanos, not now, not yet—"I was able to travel back to… to now. I'm not exactly the Steve you knew, but I… I had the chance to come back to you and I had to take it."

For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the tick of the clock and the occasional rumble of a car passing by outside. Eventually, Peggy said, "Good lord, you're telling the truth."

"Yes," Steve said. 

"But there's more to it all, I take it, than just… this."

"That's one way of putting it, sure," Steve said, mouth twisting. Gods and monsters and aliens, and Steve battling his way through one long war that felt like it steadily took him further and further away from anything Abraham Erskine had ever hoped he would be.

"You've been—will be—alive in the twenty-first century." Peggy leaned forward and lifted the lid from the teapot, swirling the contents around with a spoon. She kept her gaze on it, not on Steve, even once she replaced the lid and sat back in her chair. "How long do you have here? Is this a temporary thing, or is time travel in the future like popping to the shops—" 

"Forever," Steve blurted out. "If you'll have me. I'm not… I'm doing this all wrong. Peggy, I'm not going back there, not if you'll have me. It's been eighty years and it's only ever been you." He rose and crossed over to her, kneeling on the rug in front of her. "I broke a promise to you once before, and I don't want to ever do that to you again."

That at least had Peggy looking at him, with a faint sense of exasperation that Steve could handle a lot better than that shocked blankness. "Oh, don't be a silly ass. This is just a little much to take in all at once, you know, especially when not so long ago I was pouring a vial of your blood off of Brooklyn Bridge."

Steve blinked at her. 

"I admit," Peggy continued quickly, "a tad self-indulgent in retrospect, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time."

"I don't—" She'd poured a _what_?

"But if we're going to be silly asses over one another, I suppose it's better if we do it together rather than in different centuries."

For a moment, Steve felt like he was back in his real body, gasping for air as an asthma attack tightened like an iron band around his chest. The only difference was the cause. He couldn't help the smile that started to spread over his face: hesitant at first and then wider and wider as Peggy grinned back at him. "You mean it?"

"My darling," Peggy said. Steve knew he'd never get tired of the sight of a happy Peggy Carter. "I don't think I've ever meant anything so much."

Steve didn't think anyone would have been able to tell who moved first, who kissed who first. Did it matter? For the first time in years—decades—she was properly in his arms, smelling of the perfume and birch-and-rose soap he remembered, her nails scraping blunt at the nape of his neck in a way that was entirely new. By the time the kiss ended, Steve's knees ached and his mouth felt bruised and he knew his hair was a mess. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt happy like this: without complication, without fear.

That didn't mean there weren't still things to be dealt with, important ones. They'd have to get Bucky back from the Soviets; make sure that every Hydra head was severed and each bloody stump cauterised; figure out where to live and what Steve was going to call himself and how he could support himself. But with the prospect of Peggy by his side, all of them felt more manageable somehow. 

"I can't even afford to buy you a ring yet," Steve said, compelled to a terrible honesty as always by the way she looked at him. He'd come back to her with little more than the clothes he was standing up—well, kneeling down—in. He knew he wasn't exactly much of a catch. "I mean, if you—"

"First things first." Peggy held out her hand to him, eyes shining. "Time for that dance."


End file.
